Tactical Miscalculations
by Civilized Lee
Summary: A dramatization of the comedy of errors that occurs pretty much any time I play this game. Told from the point of view of a crew member having to watch all the terrible decisions made by his captain (i.e. me). Rated T because I swear like a sailor.


My captain is a fucking moron.

We've been on this mission for twenty-seven days, not that days mean anything out here. I'm the only human on this ship. Anymore, that is. We picked up another human a few sectors ago, but I'll get to that.

I never should have agreed to this. We've been assigned to navigate to the Federation's base to deliver a message. A fucking _message. _Are you shitting me? We've perfected faster-than-light travel, but we can't broadcast an encrypted message through space so the rebels can't intercept it?

If this ship is the Federation's last hope, then the Rebels have already won. Why they would entrust sensitive data about the Rebel warship to a fucking Engi is beyond me. It's not even a robot, it's a bunch of nanobots working together to make up a robot. Imagine a bunch of ants holding each other together to make one big ant. Sounds stupid, right? It is. That's basically what an Engi is, only robots instead of ants. And a group of ants is probably better at building stuff than these things. This is ridiculous. All he – I know Engis don't have genders but I'm calling it a he – All he cares about is completing the mission. Which would be fine if every other thing out here in deep space wasn't trying to kill us.

It started off simple enough. We were coming from a sector with a Federation base, so there wasn't much in the way of pirates or Rebels to deal with. We're about eight sectors away from the Federation stronghold where we're headed, so we knew it was going to be a long trip. Luckily we managed to pick up another crew member along the way – which is a fucking miracle because there's no way two Engis and myself are going to carry this little ship all the way through to the end. But even that almost didn't happen. We happened across a slave trader and our crazy-assed captain decided to open fire without even thinking about all the innocents on board he might kill. "Eliminating them will stop their trade once and for all," he said. Even though our mission apparently determines the fate of the Federation, our captain decided that going after some rogue slave ship was a valuable use of our time and missile cache. I only just managed to convince him to barter their lives for one of their slaves before we destroyed their ship completely. At least now we had somebody dedicated to each of our different systems. And it was a human, like me! Finally, somebody to talk to other than these damn robots. His name's Morris. He seemed a bit stressed out from being captured, but he was willing enough to help us out.

About seven days in, I started to realize this captain of ours was going to get us all killed. We'd been through a few scrapes by that point, nothing we couldn't handle. We had a pretty decent collection of scrap metal, which may not sound like much, but out here in deep space, scrap is a precious resource: you can repair your ship's hull, augment your weapons, even enhance your systems if you know how to use it. So we come up on this Rockman trader, and he offers to fix up our hull in exchange for some scrap.

Now, our hull was still at about 75% integrity, which all told is pretty good shape. What we really needed was to upgrade our shield system, so that we would prevent that hull damage in the first place. And we had enough scrap to pay for that! But no, our dumbass captain decides to patch up our ship until it's good as new, leaving us with that same flimsy-ass shield unit that can't even stand up to an asteroid hitting it.

Oh, and guess what happened next. Yeah, our captain jumped our ship straight into a fucking asteroid field. And there was a Slug pirate there, waiting for us. I don't know why they picked an asteroid field of all places for an ambush, but apparently their shields were up to it, unlike ours. Somehow we managed to take them out, but we lost a lot of drones, and our ship ended up worse off than it was before we repaired it. Which could have been avoided if we upgraded our shields, but hey, why would the captain listen to my suggestions?

That's not even the best part, though. Just about three days ago, we were plotting the next route of our course. We had two options: go to a sector with a lot of nebula activity on the scanners, or go to a known Mantis-controlled sector.

Let me tell you a little about the Mantis race. They get their name from the bugs on Earth, because they kind of look like them. Except for the fact that they're longer across than your average human is tall. These bastards are about seven feet from head to tail, and they are hyper-aggressive. We're talking _ruthless_ attackers. Imagine having fingers on the corners of your mouth to help shovel food in there. Now imagine that food is alive and fighting you, and you're breaking its arms with your powerful, sharp pincers as you devour it alive. That's not some monster out of your nightmares, that's a Mantis.

Let me remind you that at this point, our ship is pretty bare-bones. We've got four crew members, two of which are Engis, and none of us have any hand-to-hand combat experience. We don't even have any combat drones to help us out. You might think that heading into a Mantis sector with that kind of crew would be suicide, and you'd be right. You might think that knowing that, we headed into the nebula, but you'd be wrong.

Our brilliant fucking captain decided that going into the nebula resulted in too many "unknown variables" and went on and on saying crap like "outcome undefined". No _shit_ the outcome is undefined. That's the entire point of going into the nebula, so we'll be harder to track. Besides, I'd rather take my chances with whatever's lurking in that nebula than have to face a fucking squad of Mantis warriors. Either we go with the unknown and _maybe_ survive, or we spearhead a suicide mission straight into the fucking lion's den. So of course our captain decides on the latter.

Which brings me to today. We were picking up a distress beacon. Naturally, our captain, the poster-child for neutrality, decides to check it out. It's a Zoltan ship. They send a message about conducting some biological tests on our crew.

Now, if our captain was a human, or really any being capable of higher thought, this should have struck him as odd. A Zoltan-run spaceship floating out in a high-activity Mantis sector should have been the first red flag. The panic in the Zoltan's voice is also something anybody other than a fucking robot could have picked up on. But he decides to agree to this bullshit lie, and we hear the tell-tale sign of a teleportation device being calibrated on our ship.

Well, surprise fucking surprise, the Zoltans were being held hostage. By Mantises. Two of which had just teleported onto our ship and were destroying our sensor room. Oh, and the Zoltan ship started attacking us too, and that's protected by this powerful shield over the ship's _regular_ shield units, so this thing's clearly gonna be a major pain in the ass.

I start calibrating our lasers to fire at the Zoltan's shield, because I'm not about to waste any more missiles if they're just gonna get eaten up by it anyway. That's when our captain's voice comes over the intercom, saying "All essential personnel to the medical bay."

The medbay's a bit further away from the mantises than the weapon control system, so I was alright with that. The weapons are automated anyway, my job isn't much more than just pointing and clicking. In any case, I was the last to get to the medbay: the other Engi and Morris are already there, trying to extinguish a fire, which I guess is why our captain told us to get there so quickly. Just as we're about to get it under control, the Zoltans – by which I mean the Mantises in the Zoltan ship – teleport another fire bomb directly into the medbay, which promptly explodes right in front of the Engi, blasting it in half. Morris and I work on putting that fire out when I hear our captain over the intercom again. "Activating medbay," he says.

That's right. Our captain sent us into an automated medbay which heals _anybody_ inside it. This is a state-of-the-art piece of equipment here, and we were risking our lives to save it. And it's worth it, because it pretty much eliminates the need to have a trained doctor on your ship, and less crew means fewer mouths to feed, and less payments. There's really only one design flaw about these medbays:

THEY HAVE TO BE FUCKING TURNED ON TO WORK.

We managed to put the fire out, and the bots from the medbay started to treat our burns while we cleaned up the dead Engi. Not that I'm sure they can really die, but neither part of it was moving. That's when the sirens started going off, and a blue light started flashing. I knew that meant that oxygen levels were running low.

The captain, in an attempt to kill the invading Mantises, had opened almost all of the airlocks in hopes that they would suffocate. That caused them to start clawing at the doors with their pincers and their mandibles, which let me tell you is one of the most horrifying fucking noises I've ever heard in my life. Eventually, the screeching and scraping and the pounding on the door started dying down, and we heard the airlocks close. Finally, those two Mantises were dead, which meant it was safe to go back to our posts, right?

Ha ha ha wrong. I started heading back to the weapons room and Morris went to man the shields, which lead him through the oxygen room. Which was struck by a missile while he was in it. And yet, the fact that he died so quickly probably makes him more lucky than you'd think. You see where this is going, right? Our O2 levels hadn't been replenished from our dumb-ass captain opening the airlocks. And now we weren't generating any more because the machines were offline. I went to fix the breach in the oxygen room, and how I managed to do that and get back to the medbay without blacking out is beyond me.

So at this point, our oxygen systems are offline, our O2 levels are in the tank, oh, and with nobody manning the shields, we're getting hit even harder now. Oh, great, I think they just took out our weapons system. I wouldn't know because I can't leave the medbay without asphyxiating. Apparently this room has its own oxygen supply. It's enough to keep us alive, but it's not enough to spread it to the rest of the ship.

And as if this wasn't bad enough, now the captain's in here too. He says that he made a "tactical miscalculation" in opening the airlocks, and that the loss of all of our oxygen was a "minor oversight". I'd say sending us to our certain doom is a bit more than a minor fucking oversight, but at this point I guess it's all semantics.

That rending sound must be the aft of the ship breaking apart and floating off into space. Which is actually kind of unfortunate, because the medbay is in the fore. And now the sensors have stopped going haywire, which can only mean that the Mantises left. Well, either they have terrible life-scanners, or they just assumed that we'd die in here, given that half of our ship is torn to shreds and we have no propulsion system.

The captain turns on the distress beacon. Probably the first smart thing he's done this entire trip. If I'm lucky, I won't be floating out here with this fool for all of eternity.

I really hope we weren't the only ship the Federation sent on this mission.


End file.
